


The Far Side of the Moon

by aegistheia



Series: The Moonscale Universe [2]
Category: Cardcaptor Sakura
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-12-31
Updated: 2011-12-31
Packaged: 2017-11-17 06:17:56
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,233
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/548512
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aegistheia/pseuds/aegistheia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are some things that change, and some things that don't.  Touya has to discover the details for himself, though.  Three missing scenes from <a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/548510">Balancing the Moon</a>.</p><blockquote>
  <p>"To-ya," Yukito says gently.</p>
</blockquote>
            </blockquote>





	The Far Side of the Moon

**Author's Note:**

> **Title:** The Far Side of the Moon  
>  **Rating:** PG  
>  **Genre:** General  
>  **Word Count:** 2238  
>  **Warnings:** None past the usual manga canon. This AU is definitely not anime compliant now.  
>  **Also Archived On:** [Livejournal](http://aegiscrypt.livejournal.com/3458.html); [Dreamwidth](http://aegiscrypt.dreamwidth.org/3582.html).  
>  **Summary:** There are some things that change, and some things that don't. Touya has to discover the details for himself, though. Three missing scenes from [Balancing the Moon](http://archiveofourown.org/works/548510).  
>  **A.N.:** I had always wanted to add the scene in where he and Yukito went to the ocean... And then Touya started speaking up again in my mind. I'm hoping that I'm not stretching my head-canon a little too far beyond belief, but that nugget of magical theory that Eriol insist I work out wouldn't let go so easily.

"To-ya," Yukito says gently. "Don't go too close to the edge. The tides aren't merciful at this time of the year."

"What—" Touya glances around him. The edge of the bluffs springs into focus so sharp he almost checks his skin for cuts. "Ah, thanks, Yuki."

"Who could have guessed that you'd be so fixated on the ocean?" Yukito tugs him back several steps with a soft touch and a smile. "For a moment I thought you hadn't heard me."

Touya sucks in the salty air and lets the beat ring in his blood until it is slightly more bearable. "I feel like a bell," he says. Yukito won't think he's gone insane if he starts getting a little descriptive. "Like somebody had hit me and I'm resonating with all the energy of the toll."

"Like me when I'm hungry and next in line for food?"

"Like I can fly," Touya says bluntly.

Yukito's eyes widen, but he laughs a moment later. "I'm not sure if you can, but for my sake please don't try."

"Yes, well." It's not as if his conversations have ever been exactly run-of-the-mill since Sakura became the Master of the Star Cards, but his own returned magic has had an interesting side effect of making _every_ conversation he's had since then rather... odd. Normalcy may never have been meant to be his to know, but he has to wonder what it says about him when he hadn't even remembered to bid it goodbye.

Human, perhaps.

"The moon's visible early today," Yukito says, head tilted up.

"Yeah, every crater and shadow of it." The sky has been grey and dreary all day, but the swelling moon is hovering in full view in the break of clouds just above the horizon, familiar patterns and dimples a bright mosaic of impending headache in his mind.

"Did you know that the moon's darker areas are basalt plains where the lava had spilled?" Yukito looks at the moon like he needs no telescope to mark out its every secret. "The ancient astronomers thought they were seas and named them with maria and isles in mind."

"Huh," says Touya. "That's a lot of seas."

"And did you know," Yukito continues, "that we only ever see one side of the moon? It's called tidal locking. If we are to believe satellite pictures, most of the lunar maria are on the surface that our eyes can reach." He smiles up at the sky. "I wonder how much brighter the other side is to the naked eye...?"

"You'd have to move off the earth to see it, clearly." Almost against his will, his eyes drag across the horizon, where the waves are lost against the silvered distance.

Yukito chuckles. "I was thinking of making the moon spin, actually, but that's not possible, is it?"

"No," says a very familiar voice, "the moon is locked for a reason." Touya instinctively sidesteps, so the flail of limbs just barely miss his neck and latch onto his arm instead. "Touya-kun!" Akizuki Nakuru croons. "The seascape suit you. You look very fetching against the horizon with the rocks surrounding you..."

"Thank you, Akizuki-kun," Yukito says, and... Touya's far closer to the edge than he had been when he'd started thinking about the sea again. If he were the type to swear he'd have peeled the moss off the rocks.

Nakuru sniffs delicately. "While I'd like to see Touya-kun soaking wet, I'd prefer him to be wearing a thin white shirt first. I'd also prefer to appreciate the sight for longer than the few seconds he's not yet been swept away by the riptide."

"Off." Touya shrugs exaggeratedly, and she lets go with a pout and a pretentious rub to where her collarbone would be beneath her jacket. He is at once overwhelmed by a wave of exasperation. "Sometimes I can't help but wonder why I'm always surrounded by the moon types," he sighs.

"Maybe because you balance us out," Nakuru says with a sly bat of her eyelashes, "or, rather, maybe because you _can't_. Or maybe you just can't feel any less attracted to us."

Yukito saves Nakuru from bodily injury by Touya's flattest stare by asking, "What do you know of the other side of the moon, Akizuki-kun?"

Nakuru turns her nose up. "It has nothing to do with me or mine. Who cares."

"You're not fascinated by the unknown?" Yukito looks honestly mystified. "Not by the limits beyond knowledge? "

Nakuru looks at Yukito for a long moment, then smiles, actually smiles. "Some call that fear, Tsukishiro-kun." She rounds on him. "And you, Touya-kun? What do you make of that side of the moon?"

Touya is tempted to tell her to ask Yue, but that'd be rude. It's not like Yue himself would know. "All I know is that the moon is always brighter than any star in the night sky, and that's all that matters to me."

Yukito's mouth stutters on its way to a smile, and Touya spots the ice-shard flicker in his eyes before the smile curves into something a little too feline for Yukito's wont.

Of its own accord, Touya's gaze slides to Nakuru. Her eyes are gleaming, but she just smiles, too.

 

 

Touya has to excuse himself after ten minutes in Hiiragizawa's presence. Now that he can sense its unbridled potential, Hiiragizawa's magic is making his arms go numb from the pinpricks.

And to think he'd already divided his power...

"Your bathroom," he says without preamble, and Hiiragizawa gestures with an elegance that is too ancient for his adolescent frame.

Touya wouldn't call his exit a flee, but it's close. If he'd waited his legs would start to lose all sense of touch from the overload too, and he's not about to allow Hiiragizawa to witness any moment of weakness on his part if he can help it.

"Ah, Touya-kun."

Like these. "Kaho," Touya replies involuntarily before he's even turned around. He can recognize her anywhere, magic or no.

"You're quite the wellspring now," she says, her once-over of him somehow as familiar as it is foreign.

"So it seems."

"How did your reawakening feel like? Well, I suppose your being near Sakura-chan would put things in a perspective quite different from ours..."

"Your shrine," he says, when his vocabulary continues to taunt him with its abandonment, "is very... bright." Kaho can be a creature beyond words, and it's still the same after all this time.

"I do hope that's a sign that Father has been taking good care of it," she remarks cheerfully. "Does it feel healthy to you?"

He shrugs. "How does it feel like when it's not healthy?"

"Point." She peers at him, then gives him a smile that shows more in her eyes than on her lips. "I'll trust your intuition, and my own belief in Father. He is usually very good to that for which he cares."

It is an indication, Touya thinks, that they are speaking of unimportant things when neither of them are ones to dance around sensitive subjects. "Has he been good to you?" he finally says.

When she smiles at him again he finally knows that she has walked on, and so has he – and that their paths are parallel for longer than maybe even she'd suspected. "According to your perspective, or according to mine?"

"As long as he understand," Touya says. The underlying threat is only half in jest.

"Eriol-kun will feel that," she reprimands gently.

"He can take it," Touya mutters. It's the best he can do, anyway; he knows how the world works. It is no longer his role to be the ultimate protector when the battle lines are drawn, and maybe it was never his to begin with.

Still, he'll write whatever footnotes in history that he can.

"Are you happy?" she says.

"I think I will be," he replies, and she just smiles.

 

 

He doesn't want to admit it, but he's surprised by the length of time that passes before he sees her again. She'd used to hover over them all like a benevolent sky, so of course he had _missed_ her. But he'd missed her even more as of recently, because while the possibility of meeting her again has returned, she hadn't.

Until now. "Mother," Touya says.

She is seated on the branch of a flowering sakura tree, watching him with a small smile, and she is every bit as beautiful as he remembers her to be.

"Mother," he says, inanely, "your flowers are blooming."

"You haven't changed, Touya," she says, hopping down to his eye level. Ever the lover of non sequiturs, his mother. "Even if you've grown, your heart is as clear as ever. I am so proud, my son."

"Mother," he says again, the word sweet and fulfilling on his tongue; oh, how his mouth had ached to shape the word and mean it.

"Hm, maybe saying that you hadn't changed isn't accurate," she continues with a tilt of her head, light like the wind, "I bet you can call for me now!"

"...W-what?" Of all things that could have happened, Touya had _not_ prepared for this.

"Try!" She takes several steps back, then floats to the topmost branch of the tree, beaming.

"Mother, this—" Touya is well aware that he's staring, but— "This is a very odd conversation to have on our first meeting after such a long time."

"That is relative," she says, then, more gently, "and you do not need to be afraid."

It's not just fear; if he'd known how to... "I refuse to hurt you, Mother!"

"You won't," she soothes. Touya prays that his reluctance is clear in his eyes. Hope and knowledge can be so very double-edged. "It takes much more than simple malice to hurt me, and you don't even have a malicious bone in your body. Reach for me with your magic, like you're bracing against the moon's pull—"

If she were corporeal, she would have knocked them clear across the grove when she hurtled against him.

"Mother!" he gasps. The magic take him, Mother is—

—laughing?

"That was spectacular! You can project now!" She drifts to eye level, eyes shining and insubstantial fingers somehow tangling with his own and _what is going on?_

"But— but the power that I gave away has always been passive—?"

"Your magic's changed!" She makes it sound so _simple_. Yue is going to have to give him another lesson on magical theory tonight. "It's more multidimensional now. It has a psychic mass that you hadn't had before, so of course you'll have a force-field you can control—"

"But I've never been able to actually _touch_ you." Or anything else without physical mass, really.

"Touya, dear, I'm a ghost," she says. "I'm almost wholly made of yin energies. Given that your method of managing your moon-drawn magic is based on the counterbalancing of yin and yang, I'm not surprised that you can do this."

This— this— this part is unimportant right now. Touya frowns anxiously. "Mother, I'm not comforted by the idea of somebody as magically weak as me having such a large influence on you." Sakura has powerful opponents, now.

She strokes his hair. "I'm tied to this world by the virtues of blood and love. More than your powers are you yourself amplifying your call for me."

He takes a hard breath before he can quite control himself.

Mother just watches him, eyes almost too understanding to meet. "You can ask, you know," she says gently. "You will always be my son."

"I thought it was fair," he admits, and it is painful to realize. "I thought, if nobody else could see you, then I shouldn't have the chance to either, but I didn't think of you..."

"I'm not so easily lonely!" Mother chuckles.

"Then, Mother," he says, and may Father forgive him, but Touya has never run away from questions that need to be asked, "why do you linger?"

She leans down and puts both of her hands on his face, and he feels all of five years old so acutely that he aches with it. "My darling son, don't worry about my happiness. And don't worry about your father. We are neither unhappy nor discontent with what we have," she whispers, like she's tucking him into bed, and kisses his forehead. "This is about moving on as much as it is about remembrance."

She straightens and she is untouchable in her grace. "One day I will be truly gone, Touya, and you will miss me without the sting of it still fresh in your chest. Until then..." She smiles at him, and he smiles back, he can't help but smile back even when his heart feels as though it's about to break. Despite the transience of her flowers, she will be his mother forever. "Let's watch the flowers blossom together, my dear. All right?"

He turns his face to the blooms counting down to their fall. "Where will you go?" he asks. (Forgive him, Father.)

"I don't know." Mother smiles up at the sky. "I've always wanted to visit the moon. I hear there's a rabbit up there, keeping an immortal companion."

"Please stay on the side with the lunar maria," Touya says sincerely. "You won't be able to see the earth if you go to the other side."

She laughs, ghostly and real against him, and he smiles.

 

 

 

_-fin-_  



End file.
